How one county slashed sugary drink sales

By Susan Scutti, CNN

Updated 1715 GMT (0115 HKT) March 6, 2017

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Photos:How much sugar is in that drink?

In the following slides, we compare the amount of sugar found in some of America's top-selling beverages -- according to Beverage Industry magazine's 2013 State of the Industry Report -- to the sugar found in common sugary snacks.

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Photos:How much sugar is in that drink?

Soda: Coca-Cola – A 20-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola Classic contains 65 grams of sugar, which is the same amount of sugar found in five Little Debbie Swiss Rolls.

Juice: Minute Maid 100% Apple Juice – This 15.2-ounce bottle contains 49 grams of sugar, which is about the amount of sugar in 10 Oreos. Sugar occurs naturally in fruit, but natural sugar isn't any different in chemical structure from what most people refer to as added sugar. The body processes both the same way. One benefit of eating whole fruit is the fiber that helps slow absorption; that fiber is generally lost in the juice-making process.

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Photos:How much sugar is in that drink?

Juice: SunnyD Original – A 16-ounce bottle of SunnyD Original contains 28 grams of sugar. Each these six Oreos contains about 4.6 grams of sugar.

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Photos:How much sugar is in that drink?

Tea: Arizona Green Tea with Ginseng & Honey – A 23-ounce can of Arizona Green Tea contains51 grams of sugar, which is about the same as can be found in 20 Hershey's Kisses. The World Health Organization recently proposed new guidelines that recommend consuming less than 5% of our total daily calories from added sugars. For an adult at a normal body mass index, or BMI, 5% would be around 25 grams of sugar -- or six teaspoons.

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Photos:How much sugar is in that drink?

Tea: Lipton Lemon Iced Tea – There are 32 grams of sugar in this 20-ounce bottle of iced tea. Each of these 12 Hershey's Kisses contains approximately 2.5 grams of sugar.

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Photos:How much sugar is in that drink?

Energy drink: Red Bull – Three-quarters of a cup of generic-brand frosted flakes contains about 11 grams of sugar. This 16-ounce can of Red Bull has 52 grams of sugar. Red Bull and many of the companies in this gallery offer lower or no-sugar versions of their drinks. "Nearly half -- 45% -- of all non-alcoholic beverages contain 0% (sugar)," said Christopher Gindlesperger, spokesman for the American Beverage Association.

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Photos:How much sugar is in that drink?

Energy drink: Monster Energy – This 16-ounce can of Monster Energy has 54 grams of sugar. It contains the same amount of sugar as about 3.5 cups of frosted flakes.

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Photos:How much sugar is in that drink?

Milk: Generic skim milk – An 8-ounce glass of skim milk has about 11 grams of sugar. A single Starburst candy has 2.7 grams.

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Photos:How much sugar is in that drink?

Milk: Silk Vanilla Soymilk – A glass of vanilla soymilk has about 8 grams of sugar, which is equal to the amount found in three Starbursts.

Story highlights

The campaign consisted of policy changes, media communications and community outreach

Soda sales plummeted by nearly 20%, while fruit drinks decreased by about 15%

(CNN)Advertising shapes behavior, a truism given new life by a recent anti-soda campaign. A county in the heart of central Maryland aimed a three-year onslaught of TV ads, digital marketing, direct mail, outdoor ads and social media against sugary beverages. This campaign, which was accompanied by policy changes and community outreach, helped reduce sales of sweetened beverages, according to a study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Soda sales plummeted by nearly 20% in the area, researchers said, while fruit drinks decreased by about 15%.

"What we really tried to do is say join the movement, make healthy choices easy. It was a very positive campaign, and it was built on 'We know you want your kids to be healthy. This community is here to help you,' " said Nikki Highsmith Vernick, CEO of the Horizon Foundation, a nonprofit that helped initiate the campaign.

"We hope that these findings stick," Highsmith Vernick said, explaining that the community will be continuing the campaign at the policy and other levels. "I don't think a three-year campaign is enough to reverse a trend that's been coming for decades."

Howard County, USA

On its website, Howard County, Maryland, describes itself as "a successful melding of old and new, urban and rural, where the rolling green hills of the Piedmont meet the rocky fall line of the glaciers." The county's 300,000 or so residents live between Washington and Baltimore, where they enjoy proximity to 50 federal agencies, universities, Fortune 500 companies, technology, defense and health care companies.

In the past decade, localities across the nation have lashed out at sugary drinks by passing policies to limit their consumption in schools and government-owned properties, by initiating tax measures and by insisting on warning labels. Howard County was not to be left behind in the national effort to limit consumption of sugary drinks, especially since, as Highsmith Vernick pointed out, the county has "one in four kids who are at an unhealthy weight."

So in 2013, the Horizon Foundation contacted the Rudd Center to help it initiate a campaign to reduce sugary drink consumption: Howard County Unsweetened.

"Honestly, the reason I was excited by it is, I grew up in Howard County, even though I live in Connecticut now," Schwartz said.

The three-year campaign involved changing public policy and outreach in child care centers, pediatricians' offices and schools, and it included advertising and marketing communications. The campaign targeted beverages that contained any type of added sugar, most frequently regular soda, sports drinks and fruit drinks, though some communications included flavored waters, sweetened teas and flavored coffee drinks.

People were encouraged to move away from sugary drinks and toward "better beverages," including bottled water, plain tap water and tap water flavored with pieces of whole fruit, vegetables and herbs. Although 100% juice was also designated as a better beverage, communications include the caveat that portion size mattered. Diet soda was also designated as a better choice.

"We did a lot of message research," Highsmith Vernick said. What she and her colleagues heard is that "parents love their kids; they want to do the right thing by their kids; people are busy; people in low-income communities don't have a lot of money."

In deciding how to make the healthy choice the easy choice, they mainly communicated positive messages conveying the theme "we all love our kids." But they also ran some ads that said the beverage industry spends millions of dollars advertising their unhealthy options; why don't they spend more on advertising the healthy options they sell?

During the three-year period, the media campaign created 17 million impressions through cable and broadcast television advertising, digital marketing, direct mail, outdoor and facility advertising, and social media.

To measure success or failure, the researchers collected retail sales data from 15 Howard County supermarkets and compared them to 17 equivalent supermarkets in Pennsylvania. They analyzed weekly sales data for a single year before the study (2012) and then compared this to the campaign years, January 2013 through December 2015.

"The analysis is complicated," Schwartz said, explaining that when you're looking at change over time in one place, you need to rule out that it's a general, national trend happening everywhere in the country. After all, researchers have tracked people moving away from sugary soda overtime.

"We've been seeing this sort of gradual decrease (in sugary soda sales) on the order of like 1% in a year or 2% in a year across the country," Schwartz said.

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In the 15 Howard County supermarkets, soda sales decreased by 19.7% from 2012 through 2015, whereas sales remained relatively stable in the 17 comparison supermarkets. Fruit drink sales decreased by 15.3% in Howard County compared with no change in the comparison stores. Sales of 100% juice decreased by an even 15% in Howard County compared with just 2.1% in Pennsylvania. Finally, sales of sports drinks and diet soda decreased in both communities, but the decreases were not significantly different between Howard County and the comparison group.

Child care centers in Maryland also saw changes during the test period, with state child care facilities having to provide healthy drinks while offering support to breast-feeding moms. Additionally, they need to encourage physical activity and limit the time children spend in front of screens.

According to Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, who wrote an editorial published beside the new study in JAMA Internal Medicine, drinking sugary beverages "is associated with obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease." In the editorial, he commended the researchers' use of sales register data (instead of self-reported data from participants), and he added that Howard County's success in decreasing the sales of sugary beverages "is gratifying."

Shared resources for other communities

Laura Schmidt, a professor of health policy in the school of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, said the study is very worthwhile and likened it to community campaigns targeting reductions in tobacco consumption.

"To my knowledge, this is the first time we have seen that this approach works for sugary beverages too," Schmidt said. "A big strength of the researchers' approach was that they worked with and for community partners to develop and roll out the campaign to reduce sugary beverage consumption. Public health solutions should come from the community."

Schmidt's university has sponsored SugarScience.org, a digital educational initiative to helping people understand the science on sugar and health.

According to Laura M. Bogart, a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corp., the new study "shows the power of communities in being able to make changes, when key stakeholders are at the table and engaged in the process of addressing community priorities."

Still, it is essential to understand how the campaign led to changes in behavior, Bogart said. Since residents in Howard County had higher incomes and educational levels than the comparison communities, "we cannot be sure whether the campaign would work as well in places with lower socioeconomic status," she added.

"It would be especially important to do further research to figure out which aspects of the campaign were more effective, so that communities would know how to prioritize different activities," especially if they are operating with a limited budget, Bogart said. "It would also be important to do a similar study in lower-income communities, to know how well these results apply to other types of communities."

Can other communities do the same? The Horizon Foundation's Highsmith Vernick replied without hesitation: "Yes!"

"These are definitely doable, particularly on the policy side," she said, noting that even communities that are strapped for cash can change policy. She said an important goal of the program was "a peer-reviewed research article in a major medical journal that not only validates our work but gives a road map for other communities across the country."

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"We have messaging and focus group research that we can provide to other interested communities across the country," Highsmith Vernick said.

According to Schwartz, the positive results in Howard County should hold, since across the country, things have been "consistently moving in that direction. ... I feel like that train has left the station. I'd be very surprised if that reversed." That said, more research would be needed to see whether the gains continue into the future.

One real strength of the intervention was how comprehensive it was; another was its grass-roots origins.

"It really was an example of people in the community making changes themselves," Schwartz said. "It wasn't like outside researchers came in and tried to impose something on them. They really did it themselves."